Companies are often penalised for violating regulatory requirements of various kinds, including those under competition law. Some of the relevant statutes only impose liability on the company, but not its directors or employees, whose wrongdoing must nonetheless be attributed to the company to render it liable. Where a company infringes competition law or another regulatory statute and seeks to recover the penalty by suing its delinquent insiders for breach of duties, should courts allow or prevent the company’s recovery? This article examines this complex issue—which straddles competition/regulatory law, company law, agency law, and private law (in particular the illegality defence)—from a theoretical perspective, and makes two key contributions. First, it advances a refined concept of optimal deterrence, and argues that courts should not deprive the company of its well-established right to sue under company and agency law by interpreting the deterrence policy under competition law or another regulatory statute in light of this concept and recognising the limits of judicial law-making. Second, this article demonstrates for the first time how courts should analyse private law claims arising from corporate regulatory infringements under the ‘range of factors’ approach to the illegality defence, using competition law infringements as an illustration. Under our proposal, courts need not proceed to the stage of balancing competing and incommensurable factors to arrive at the conclusion that companies should not be precluded by the illegality defence from recovering against their delinquent insiders.

中文翻译：

---

最优威慑、非法防御和公司归属

公司经常因违反各种监管要求（包括竞争法规定的要求）而受到处罚。一些相关法规只对公司规定了责任，而不对公司董事或员工规定了责任，但他们的不当行为必须归咎于公司才能使其承担责任。如果公司违反竞争法或其他监管法规并通过起诉其违法内部人违反职责来追回罚款，法院应该允许还是阻止公司追回？本文从理论的角度审视了这个跨越竞争/监管法、公司法、代理法和私法（特别是非法抗辩）的复杂问题，并做出了两个关键贡献。首先，它提出了优化威慑的精炼概念，并辩称，法院不应根据这一概念解释竞争法或其他监管法规中的威慑政策，并承认司法立法的局限性，从而剥夺公司根据公司法和代理法确立的起诉权。其次，本文以竞争法侵权为例，首次论证了法院应如何在违法抗辩的“因素范围”法下分析企业监管侵权引起的私法诉讼请求。根据我们的建议，法院无需进入平衡竞争因素和不可通约因素的阶段就得出结论，即公司不应因违法抗辩而无法追回其拖欠的内部人。